Thursday, November 10, 2005

Two Degrees of Separation

There's a disclosure meme going round at Cathy's and DPF's. What a good idea.

In my time with Prebble's Rebels and volunteer in the ACT Research Unit in the late '90's, I had the pleasure of meeting:

DPF; Blogfather, not sat down with enough alcohol with this guy yet ;-)

Cathy; several grey hairs came about being editor for Rebel Yell and worrying whether Cathy's piece on Trevor Mallard would see me in court. "A duck that needs to be shot down" was one of the lines I recall. Pretty tame compared with today's blog vitriol but enough to spook me clear of defamation for a while.

Rodney Hide, raconteur par excellence. Best moment was sitting round the office listening to Rodney telling the story of Donna Awatere Huata's dad.

Through various other noble causes:

Met Keith last year around the VUWSA bar. Studiously avoided him when he was trying to crucify me about J Day. Keith mistook 'not returning phonecalls' for a disappearing act. Little did he know I followed an old Mossad boss' advice: "No comment" is a comment. Say nothing.

Sat in the same POLS tutorials as Matt. Bumped into him a couple of times since then.

Introduced myself to Russell Brown at his launch of the Great NZ Argument earlier this year in my traditional greeting; blurting out staccato sentences and acting like a twat.

I met beNZylpiperazine last year and will one day let him drag me along to Toastmasters classes again!

Bumped into Whig at that Nuffield Street brick shithouse ACT used as offices in Orkland a few years back.

I've met Gary, Jordan and many others at bloggers' drinks a while back.

This list is far from perfect. I will have excluded bloggers who I have met but not caught their name, seeing how bad I am with proper nouns and short-term memory. Apologies. I think the Japanese are onto something handing out business cards as often as handshakes. Then there's those pseudo-anonymous bloggers out there whom I think I know but don't know I know. Maybe next time.